Questions About Structure

It seems to me that, heated as it was, the discussion between Antigram and K-Punk regarding education and arguments from experience has prompted a lot of productive discussion, which is a testament to the value of the blogosphere. Although I am interested in the discussions surrounding the relationship between specific educational institutions, class structure, and habitus around which these discussions have centered, I find myself focusing on more abstract questions surrounding the ontological status of structure. In a response to my post, Daniel writes:

I want to respond to this point about individuals and structures.

My position is that individuals have nothing to do with class, because individuals do not exist. I think the idea of the individual is an ideological illusion. I want to radically excise the individual from philosophy; I believe that the individual has no ontological status whatsoever.

I precisely reject the conjecture that we could talk about structure as lying between individuals, in the sense “the individual finds herself enmeshed in a web that exceeds her control, understanding, and intentions.” No – I think (the mirage of) the individual is itself a product of that web, and there is no feedback relation between the individual and that web.

I think if we want to talk about feedback vis-a-vis structure, we need to talk about agents, objects, subjects, not individuals. To my mind, the concept of the individual is utterly compromised, and, since Freud, redundant.

When someone argues in this way, claiming that “the individual is itself a product a product of that web, and there is no feedback relation between the individual and that web [structure, system]”, what is the ontology presupposed by such a claim? That is, what ontological status are we granting to structure? What kind of think is structure? How does structure produce individuals as effects? In what way does structure exist? Given that we never directly encounter structures, what set of considerations lead us to posit the existence of structures?

I suspect that there is a misunderstanding here between Antigram and I, and that he takes me to be saying something very specific when I evoke the category of “individuals”. However, for anyone who has spent time on this site, I hope that it is clear that I am somewhat sympathetic to the claims Antigram is here enunciating. It seems to me that these are precisely the sorts of questions Deleuze is addressing with his account of individuation, where he describes the movement from the virtual to the actual as the movement from multiplicities or structures to actualized individuals. That is, Deleuze, in his early work, is striving to account for the precise way in which the individual is a “product of structure”. For me the question is one of how structures comes to be, how they pass away, and how they maintain themselves over time. Suppose we treat language, following Saussure, Hjelmslev, and Jakobson, as an example of structure. The first question is necessitated because we know that there are different languages and that these languages therefore came to be. Similarly, the fact that we no longer speak Sanskrit tells us that languages pass away. Finally, the fact that languages persist from generation to generation indicates that there must be a way in which structure maintains and transmits itself.

What, then, is it that we’re talking about when we talk about structure? Antigram’s comments suggest that there is one thing, structure, and another thing, individuals, such that structures produce individuals. Or rather, Antigram’s statements suggest that there is only one thing: structure. Yet where do we ever find these structures and what leads us to conclude that they exist? Is structure something that exists in its own right, as Antigram seems to suggest? Is there one thing, Language, and another thing Speech (individuals, individual events), such that Speech is only an instantiation of transcendent structure? Or rather, is structure shorthand for a heuristic device that linguists, anthropologists, political theorists, etc. create to describe pattens common to a group of agents within a particular geographical and historical context, such that there is no such thing as Language independent of Speech, but only speech perpetually reproducing language? When we say that individuals do not exist, are we not also saying that structures would exist regardless of whether or not there were bodies to embody them? Or are structrures only in bodies, yet are emergent patterns that cannot be reduced to any one individual body? That is, what is the explanatory work that the concept of structure is doing? Do structures function like iron and inescapable laws– Saussure suggests as much when he argues that it is impossible for any individual to invent a word –or are structures more like fuzzy aggregates that exemplify patterned activity that the theorist idealizes or purifies and then reifies as a set of iron laws governing social interactions? Do structures have an agency of their own, like Hegelian Geist, or is there something else at work here?

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4 Responses to “Questions About Structure”

I think we need to make a rigorous separation between individuals on the hand, and bodies on the other. I am happy to talk about bodies, and believe that we should talk about them; what I think it is important to avoid doing, though, is endowing them with consciousness.

I am beginning to suspect that this whole “working class” “ruling class” affect business is a way of precisely endowing bodies with consciousness – what kind of an affect is confidence, anyway?

It seems to me that the second you have a conscious body, you have an individual. I say that individuals do not exist, and I say that, for this reason, they have nothing to do with class. Class has to do with bodies and language, which is to say, in Badiouian terms, that it has to do with democratic materialism. “There is nothing but bodies and language,” writes Badiou, “except there are truths.”

The term “individual” is a generic term that comes from Deleuze, referring to any individuated entity, whether it be a rock, a body, a social system, etc. I was using the term in this sense, not in the sense of a Lockean self-directing individual endowed with consciousness. In this connection, I see no reason to draw a rigorous distinction, as you suggest, between individuals and bodies. Bodies are one type of individual that result form a particular process of individuation.

Confidence strikes me as a particular disposition or know-how that results from how a particular type of body is individuated or produced within a particular sort of social field. Perhaps an analogy to sport would be useful. There is a difference between the dispositions of my body and the dispositions of a body that has undergone all sorts of training to play hockey. Not only does the hockey player have a certain familiarity with its body on ice and in relation to the hockey stick that I entirely lack, but it also relates to the the other players in a way that is different from the way I relate to those players. All of this results from a milieu of individuation that produces a particular type of body and intersubjectivity. Confidence is similar. It is an product of an entire set of social individuations that take place within a particular milieu, producing a subjectivity that encounters itself as competent, entitled, and as the origin of its own success. I think its this third property that you seem to be objecting to the most in a certain concept of the individual, i.e., the common thesis of liberal political theory that the individual is the sovereign of itself and is its own creation (ignoring altogether the social dimension in which the individual is produced).

Another way of thinking about the production of this disposition of confidence (is it really an affect? certainly it has affective components), would be in terms of Foucault’s understanding of subjectivization. The panopticon is a particular machine of individuation that produces a self-monitoring individual. There are other machines of individuation. Why not machines that produce bodies with a disposition towards confidence? What I find interesting here is that those endorsing elements of K-Punk’s original claims are talking about effects of structure. I’m baffled as to what you could possibly mean by structure if you cut out all subject-producing and subjectifying effects of structure.

Thank you for your explanation of Deleuze’s concept of individuation. When I was saying body, I think, you were saying individual, since I was not necessarily referring only to human bodies. So we are on the same page here.

I fully agree that structures produces bodies, and that there exists machines of individuation. My problem with the that there exists an affect called confidence which can be individuated on a 0/1 basis is that this model seems very simplistic to me.

Unless we were being very crudely Aristotelian, we would surely not say that the Ice Hockey player has the “Ice Hockey Player” affect, whereas I do not, and this is the essential difference between us. He has been trained, whereas I have differently trained, and these different methods of training have produced a qualitative difference between us which cannot be reduced to the absence/presence of one magical affect.

I believe that we absolutely should be talking about machines of individuation, in a Foucauldian way – but you notice that nobody has really yet down so. The grand generalizing claims which have so been issued is completely anathema to the Foucauldian method, which consists in part (the ethical part?) of precisely demonstrating how machines of individuations work. The procedure by which confidence is supposedly installed in bodies has not been demonstrated, and I don’t think it can be, because, again, I don’t think that it could possibly come down to one thing.

For me, following Lacan, the subject is what is left over when structure fails. As Dolar puts it, the Althusserian subject is hailed by the ISA, and the Lacanian subject is what remains after that hail. This is why I say that subject has to take responsibility for their own position as subject – the subject has to recognize that their own position as subject is freely chosen, and not imposed.

I fully agree that structures produces bodies, and that there exists machines of individuation. My problem with the that there exists an affect called confidence which can be individuated on a 0/1 basis is that this model seems very simplistic to me.

Unless we were being very crudely Aristotelian, we would surely not say that the Ice Hockey player has the “Ice Hockey Player” affect, whereas I do not, and this is the essential difference between us. He has been trained, whereas I have differently trained, and these different methods of training have produced a qualitative difference between us which cannot be reduced to the absence/presence of one magical affect.

I believe that we absolutely should be talking about machines of individuation, in a Foucauldian way – but you notice that nobody has really yet down so. The grand generalizing claims which have so been issued is completely anathema to the Foucauldian method, which consists in part (the ethical part?) of precisely demonstrating how machines of individuations work. The procedure by which confidence is supposedly installed in bodies has not been demonstrated, and I don’t think it can be, because, again, I don’t think that it could possibly come down to one thing.

I don’t think that any process of individuation comes down to one thing, as it always involves a field or milieu. Affects, like anything else only emerge as a result of processes of individuation, (they’re not inborn). As Spinoza, Freud, and Lacan argued, there might be some root affects, yet the more complex affects require a genesis that involves a relationship to these machines of individuation. In his ISA essay, Althusser speaks of the schools, religion, the family, media, etc., all as agencies through which the conditions of production are reproduced across time. This reproduction, I take it, involves the moulding of certain sorts of subjects. This would include, I think, the moulding of various types of dispositions, affects, and know-how as a function of the place in structure that the individuated individual (a particular body) contingently comes to identify. I agree that the specifics of such an account would require a much more nuanced and sophisticated microanalysis of these mechanisms.